Three Dreams in the Key of G

by Marc Nash

  ACT) Take your proud boast of managing to free yourselves from seasonal reproduction. Through wholly mastering your environment, how you can operate anywhere on the planet. Any place, any time. Fancy! Desire pursued for its own ends, rather than mine, now become your fervour. Periodic, rhythmic reproduction was all the House system ever stipulated, but you cocked a snook and flipped a non-reversible digit at me when you discharged yourselves. So, like a reluctant parent I gave you your head and you, like adolescent Jacobins, lopped off my Divine Right of succession. But the terror and insecurity that followed such a torrent of unleashed passion... Inevitably you came crawling back to me, prehensile tail between your legs, so shrivelled it was mistaken for a second penis. Natural Selection, being something of an aesthete, wasn’t standing for that and decorously merged it to become the foreskin. At least, that’s what he told me during one of our old-times’ sakes reunion drink-ups. Me, I was beyond caring by that point. You, my issue, were already out in the world. You made your beds, now lie in them. Or as evolutionary teenagers, should that be: you lay all day in your beds, now get up and make them!

  ACTAT) (XXX) An internal meteorology, imbrued so as to generate all-year round stewing rather than seasonal heat. Tempests, flash floods, intermittent drizzle, or merely a sustained bout of inclemency. You altered the nature of the seed around which the precipitatory impulse would crystallise. You broiled the sexual broth and managed to reflux desire. But still I could wave you cheerfully on your highly evolved, sweaty way. As you were operating on a planetary scale, we could both prosper. Winning the demographics sweepstakes hands down, from all the other creatures that still walked on their hands.

  AGTAT) I say you would prosper but, well, here’s the thing. As with food, if all those other animals only had programmed copulation, then there could be no thought about the who, what and whys. But because you appropriated suzerainty over your instinctual urges, then you also had to take responsibility for them. Why and to what purpose and whence did they derive? The origin – well, your biological destiny – was still to relay me of course, though that remained masked by your sybaritic egos. Lust having been emblazoned with the nobility of desire. The Why? – well, that too remained a vestigial metabolic excitation, though you enchantingly interlarded these reflexes with a whole gamut of enhancers, mental and otherwise. After the act itself, you are able to pontificate on what has just transpired. To elevate its stature, to promote its nourishing fibre, to canonise its spiritual heart. Works of art abound, dedicated to it. Treatises on its complexion are composed. Reciprocity between diagnoses for its impedimenta and its inhibition, prompting further diagnoses upon further.

  ACTAT) (YYY) But underlying it all, nagging doubts. Fleeting sensations, shadowy feelings. I mean in the spaces between, rather than necessarily during the fulgurant act itself. It’s not automatic, yet does seem rather compulsive. One is in full control, except for those moments during when one relinquishes it. You maintain full license over the matter, but it does seem to return you to a temporality and state, before you were so enfranchised. How am I so well versed on your most intimate confidences and confusions? Because I have read your species’ diary. Since I am the primal scene. For each and every one of you. I am the director and the scriptwriter, while you are my hired parts. The talent to coin the parlance. I’m the executive producer concerned only with the bottom line, the money shot. You can edit all you want, but I am the one who performs the splicing. Everything comes back to first movers. And you can primal kick, scream and moan all you like. You, flagellants and ecstacists both, immolate yourselves on my behalf. For all your sexual autonomy, mutatis mutandis, you fall back on predictable patterns of instinctual reproduction anyway and mint more royalties for me. Oh I’m so lucky to have you as my symbiotic host! Actually, luck as we all know, has diddly squat to do with it. Don’t we make an odds couple?

  AUG) So, whether it came about from her always worrying about the He, or him being perennially troubled with the behaviour of the She and accordingly, both being concerned with the fate of their progeny, you adapted for sex on tap. A bipartite bind on a double bind. Wrapped up with a double bow on top. Coitus as apprehensive fun and anxiety-laden recreation. Whoopee-doo! Just awarded myself a new set of stock options. At heart still lay my categorical imperative, no matter how you spun it to suit yourselves. Non-procreational copulation, in order to safeguard the investment in your posterity! It’s got my signature right through it like a stick of rock don’t you think? How sweet a pair the three of us make.

  II.IX.MCMXCVIII

  Post-summer holiday hibernation and I’m back in the old routine. Only now, the oblique seclusion on the beach plays on my mind. A new addition to the daily inventory of anxieties. Friends, Romans and counterparts. Or lack thereof. Like mother like daughter. Set me thinking. Sent me to my address book. Spent my ambition. Hardly surprising, when you have neither time, inclination, nor energy, to while away with your friends. Your old friends. Those voluntarily chosen of one’s own free will, sound of mind and body. Dear, dear friends from my childhood and schooling.

  Naturally, the first winnowing came at that migratory age of opportunity and expansion. The post-school launch into the lashing high seas of majority. Full-blown unyoking of the umbilical cord (all the foundation is just navel fluff). That shredding of the adolescent safety net and its restitching into a flimsy rope mesh bridge for embarkation and rigging for scaling the heights. Some dived in headlong. Others just plopped. Either way, we all fell through the holes and plummeted. Adrift, in amongst the adult archipelago.

  I clung on for dear life in those choppy waters with my most witchey-pooey friend Caroline, but she was steering for university. I thought we did magnificently, to pull off preserving a long-distance relationship beyond all the icebergs for as long as we did. Shivering and submerged, still we would not let go. But there was no body heat to share. Yet it was really more about chronology rather than distance. We could only meet according to her timetable of recesses. And as we breathlessly caught up with one another on all that had transpired, her as a young woman, rocket propelled in an expanding universe, me married and on a contracting orbit, I realised that I could not breathe in her rarefied atmosphere. It wasn’t that she was an intellectual snob, for our misguided loyalty through length of service mitigated against that. Just, now we were arrhythmic. I sensed I was now the control test for all her experimentation. What would have befallen her were she not catalysing her life. However, she did impart some of her early observations before flitting off back to her glasshouse.

  In what was to be premonitory for when my tempo too would be governed by term times, she expounded on the vagaries of what she called her life raft theory. She’d washed up on the presumed solid surety of university. Just like a whole flotilla of other bedraggled souls who didn’t know anybody else around them either. Each had been the brightest topsail gliding through their schools, but now, without reference points, were most uncertain of their trajectory, both social and cerebral. They still found themselves bobbing along in an ocean. Only this one was undifferentiated. The size of a goldfish bowl. Teeming and intensely scrutinising. Positioning was all. And so they adhered to the nearest cluster; lawyer docked with lawyer; physicist integrated with physicist; historian verified historian; phys-ed tackled phys-ed. They didn’t veer very far. Thus they will indubitably spend the rest of their lives, trying to divest themselves of those self-same bosom buddies. Just like Caroline.

  She adumbrated the qualities of her real friends. Refined ones discriminatorily acquired through taste. Those that furnished the small hours alcohol when she’d just been dumped by a lover. Or those that kicked her door down if she’d managed to garner her own supply and withdrawn behind locked quarters to trepan the tremors on her own. Stupidly, rather than weigh the significance of her warning, I got hung up on the hurt of her not calling for me to rush to her rescue on these occasions. Thereby me ranking as a true friend. Of course, the snags of babysitter and school r
un would have scuppered any mercy dash I might imagine I could have essayed. That and the utter impossibility of rustling up a bottle of spirits after eleven o’ clock in this deadened town.

  Pal palsy part deux. The next loaded milestone, or mild lodestone to be shed, occurs through homogeneity rather than divergence. A corollary of all your peers undertaking the same life decisions to have families. How everyone’s in the same boat, now they too now can’t spare the time or effort. (Or in one case, excommunicated from the church of family by her polycystic ovaries, the ex-friend proceeded to black-ball us from her life one by one, as we each fell pregnant.) No, as I scan my address book, it’s more deep-rooted than that. Their seemingly indelible names have been scored out. Self-preservation. Theirs, I mean. Moved away from the area, seeking after giving their children a better start in life. I’ve uncovered that they no longer reside at that house, but not bothered to track them down to their new coops. If I couldn’t make the effort to see them here, I’ve no chance of seeing them from afar. They’ve become deracinated to me. The natural wastage of my address book. Nothing’s deep-rooted at all.

  Except us, evidently. For why can’t we aspire to move out of the area, to give our offspring a better upbringing? Due to me getting my co-ordinates wrong. Bearing true north instead of magnetic north; ie the pull of his friends. Colour-coded and convenient cronies. And of more import than our own children, evidently. With friends like his, who needs extra-terrestrials? As for me, my surrogate friends are determined by the exigencies of my newly adopted life. NCT and pregnant yoga communards. Playgroup, nursery and now school parents. While the former drift away into their own private but supple hells, the latter I spend my time politicking and diplomacying among, in order to get them to like my children. Monitoring whispers of swapped telephone numbers. Watching for furtive exchanges of party invites. The stakes are very high. The defence of the realm of my daughter’s development, no less. She may be responsible for electing who her playmates are inside. But here, out in the carpark, favoured grace determines whom are players and whom are not.

  The little faces register nothing of the subterfuge occurring above their heads. But they cotton on. They are innately programmed to pick up and respond. For how could they fail not to? Their mothers with expressions like defeated Oscar nominees at awards time. To discover we – that is, both Suzanne and I – didn’t merit an accolade. Of course, it’s who you know darling. That bitch! I don’t care that it was the first week of term and her little spawn of Beelzebub didn’t know any of the new kids. It should have been the whole class invited round to fingerpaint on her wallpaper, with chocolate birthday cake melted by hot little hands.

  Yeah? Well you should have had the school calendar in mind when you were procreating missus! You and your asinine black-hand gang! With your prissy manicures concealed inside leather gloves against the autumn chill. And the Rayburns, hardly harbouring milky eyes from the rheumy sun? More likely to filter out the wavelength of us whey-faced women, even, as you cast disdainful darts from behind their embrasure. Walkman earphones for women who never go anywhere on foot (save the gym treadmill), in order to blot out our background chatter. Since you can’t bear to fall in behind our bromidic hum.

  Who do you take your direction from I wonder? I half-expect you to whisper down the cuff of your blouse, to receive the holy orders of your mothers superiors’ clique. The updated aloof gesture from your moisturised handlers. The latest affectation mandate from your fashionista wranglers. But then I realise how ridiculous you are in your black clad sensory deprivation. Aren’t you aware how the stark gloved contrast lights up the white envelopes like a searchlight beam? There are people who do real secret agent stuff in this land and they’re dying for it. If I was petty enough, I’d utilise black envelopes. Blend in unseen against the coven’s uniform. You wouldn’t have a clue it was even taking place, if I chose not to invite you and your brat. Or maybe I’d flaunt it. Rub it in your face. Wear white gloves like some photographic inversion of everything you are. Embossed black invites for a kids’ party, how apposite!

  So, I’m thrust back into the happenstance of alliances with the parents of other kids outside the blocs and cliques of the autumn party posses. After an initial screening out of the psychopathic ones from my new square circle (a habit I wish both my husband and daughter would practice), I have of course spent the ensuing time trying to rid myself of their cordiality. Just as Caroline foretold from her ivory tower. Smart-arsed cow!

  It’s normally at this point of proceedings (what a wonderful resource the internet is!) that the Authorities try to get a bit personal. Roll out some precious protagonist from your former life and put them on the end of a speaker-phone to entreat with you. Crackle-crackle, fizz-fizz. Enhances the tremors in their already pavid delivery. Surmising that it will jemmy open a disused chamber in your hardened heart. But I’m exempt from any of that schtick! I’m a regular Orphan Annie. So it’s inevitable that they’ll go the other way and try to nudge me towards suicide. Like I’ve got nothing to live for. See, that’s how well they’re attuned to me. I’m responsible for all the other orphans here with me. I’ve got plenty of ties.

  *

  I’m answering an ad for a char in Shadwell. Bounding up the wrought iron stairs of a Peabody block of flats, I’m slammed hard into the clammy wall and pinned there. My chest poked rigid against my diaphragm like a sergeant major’s baton. There is no breath there to release my imprisoned knot. Behind the retinas of my eyes I feel a thousand stabbing pricks, as if each one is a cajoling spur, towards what I know not. My legs feel like anchors, tugging on me as if to suck me back down towards the sweep of the stairwell. And yet I instinctively perceive they will not bear the weight of my trunk. I manage to sink to my knees, the instantaneous remonstration of abrading skin being overriden by the inundation of all my mass centripetally flying into my stomach. I haul myself down the stairs as if on a sledge, only my frame is of flesh instead of wood and the surface I’m moving across is concrete, rather than compacted snow. I didn’t pursue the job that day.

  I did return to the site, however. The scene of my humbling. The locus of my felling. I had to find out what all that had been about. I was somewhat more circumspect this time, but the stairwell still exuded menace. Bent over, I took them as a blind person, or a dog on the scent might. Utilising my hands as buttress, arse the highest point of my skeleton thrust up in the air. My head was swimming in the sensation that I was being dragged down head-first, rather than ascending the stairs. I appear drawn to number 17, not the flat of the job interview, but one on the floor below. I convince the war-widowed mother who answers my knock to let me look inside. Spun her some guff about how I used to live here when I was young... Perhaps it’s not guff, only nothing seems right about the place. How the hell would I know that then? I thank her for her forbearance and leave her to her screeching bairn and milk boiling over. I feed my hands down on to the stair ahead of me and kedge the rest of my body over. Slow but sure progress as I steer into safe haven.

  At the foot of the stairs, I am posed in a stance of having my nose pressed to the floor at the doorway and notice an outline of the original building imprinted on the pavement. Goddamnit! This wasn’t the original edifice. Rebuilt after war damage no doubt. Now I just couldn’t help myself. The woman refuses to let me back into number 17, until I’m almost battering her door down. She’s screaming for me to get out and leave her alone as she hides the kid behind her legs. I smash her in the stomach and she crumples. God in Heavens! Why did I do that? Why have I done any of this? Why am I here? The rozzers find me sitting on the stairs quietly weeping. I was only twenty-four months old for christsakes! How the horrible man from the Council had punched me in the stomach to make me release my grip from around my mother’s legs. And punched her once just for good measure. I think that gently squeezing the copper’s hand as I related this pricked his sympathy (either that or he fancied me) and he let me off with a caution. It was then that I knew I had to h
ightail it out of lowend Britain.

  XXII.XI.MM

  My autonomic nervous system must have propelled me here to the school. In America they have fancy cars with inboard computers to perform the errand for you. My knock down version relies on the school run. Four times a day to and fro, I must have worn a groove in the tarmac. So now I travel on rails. Tramlined, I cannot even recall the drive over, such is the journey imprinted on my skeleton through assuetude. Just as I cannot feel my watch against my wrist, I have no sense of the road under me, or even the car’s carapace around me. There’s a good reason I am not constantly reminded of the feel of a timepiece against my skin, so that my mind can concentrate on other things. Like piloting a killing machine on roads where children can be found crossing.

  Fortunately there are none today. For I have failed to remember that it was school Remembrance Day and that the infants are disgorged late. Just as I have found in the past that it was Founders’ Day, when the school sunk my schedule with a half-day holiday and a peeved phone call enjoining me to reclaim my daughter from their property. You could never trip me up on the closing times of any shop. But my child’s education routine forever hobbles me. Fortunately I was not the lone dunce on show, in the corner of a car park, unencumbered by cars.